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The present R&D approach to new renewable energy sources includes a drawback which could negate their environmental significance. New renewable energies are affected by a technical limitation because of the random intermittent nature of their power generation which hinders them from fully expanding into the electricity market. As a consequence, the contribution which renewable electric energy sources make is just significant in terms of world electricity generation and only marginal in terms of total energy consumption. Thus, in spite of expectations, the practical achievable amount of environmental benefits arising from new renewable energy would not be enough to counteract the environmental crisis. It is known that the intermittence of energy supply can be removed by implementing grid-tied power systems, adding a further stage aimed to chemically store the intermittent solar energy by producing clean synthetic fuels. Until now this chance was considered of little importance, on the contrary, it should become a compulsory solution so that renewable energy can acquire an actual and environmentally consistent significance.

A method to evaluate the room temperature effect in deteriorating the performance of flat plate PV systems is investigated. The calculations, applied to crystalline Silicon arrays, show a significant energy loss with respect to reference temperature conditions, especially in correspondence to the sites with highest insolation, in which the effect can amount up to about 15%. As a consequence, the previous projections about kW h cost for large scale PV power stations should be rectified by introducing a correction factor accounting for thermal effects. The calculations were carried out for 64 zones, particularly suitable for siting PV plants and distributed among 15 countries over a latitude belt ranging from about 40 degrees North to 15 degrees South. For each zone, it was accounted both for room temperature and insolation historical data. The final results show a linear correlation between yearly global sun radiation density and room temperature effect, which appears quite general, so that, for any other site within the same latitude belt, it is possible to account for thermal effect on PV kW h cost simply by knowing the global sun radiation density on horizontal surface (usually the only experimental available datum).